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Meme
Author: Aaron Starmer

 

“When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.”

    —RICHARD DAWKINS, THE SELFISH GENE

    “Go fuck yourself @RichardDawkins.”

    —MULTIPLE PEOPLE ON TWITTER

 

 

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 30


   ONE DAY AFTER


   LOGAN


   WE BURIED COLE WESTON LAST NIGHT, on the hundred acres behind Meeka’s house.

   “Are you sure you want him back here?” I asked her. “Where your parents might snowshoe over him, or something might dig him up? We could still use the firebox.”

   “This is my choice,” Meeka said as she gazed into the waist-deep grave we’d dug on Friday night, out past the orchard and next to the mossy stone wall where Cole had threatened us. “I need to know exactly where he is. If it makes you feel better, you can bury him deeper.”

   It did make us feel better, and with four digging, we deepened the hole to our ears, very nearly the standard six feet under. Cole’s body was encased in a Thule car top carrier. Big enough for an entire family’s skis . . . or one teenager. We lifted the makeshift coffin from the tractor and set it next to the grave. I opened it a crack, barely enough to slip in the bag with our old phones, our only links to this, a failsafe if anyone considered betrayal. Then we pushed it into the ground, piled on the dirt and rocks until the hole was full and we could smack it flat with the backs of shovels and kick leaves over the surface.

   In silence, with the rest of us standing and clinging to the tractor’s frame, Meeka drove back through the mud and dark. Outside the barn, we stripped off our coveralls and bagged them up with everything else that Grayson would throw in the firebox at his family’s sugarhouse. Meeka had filled a pressure sprayer with water and a little bleach and we sprayed down the tractor, and then we all stripped naked and doused each other with the stuff. No one was embarrassed or confused. We were horrified, or at least I was, but not about the nakedness. We’d taken things as far as they could go.

   There’s a good chance we’ll get away with this. A long, snowy winter would help. Plus some time to let it all sink in. It’s crazy how fast it’s gotten to this point. We’re not even into November of our senior year. Up until the end of summer, Cole and Meeka were together. The rest of us were hanging out and hooking up, but they were serious. Plural. They spoke in the language of we, and about the future.

   When we move in together. When we get married. When we have kids.

   That third one nearly came true in July. Apparently, there was a broken condom that Cole neglected to mention. A scare. Crying. Arguments about money. And then, four days later than expected, blood. Relief.

   By the end of August, the relationship was over. It happened in private. Only the two of them knew what was said, but it was enough to turn them against each other. And Meeka went from planning a future to regretting a past.

   That’s when Cole got dangerous.

 

* * *

 

   • • •

   “Are we evil?” Holly asked me last night as we drove away from the barn, the rocks from the dirt road dinging the underside of my Hyundai.

   “No,” I said. “He was the evil one. Would you have rather it been Meeka? Or us? Or other people?”

   “Of course not. And I know, I know, I know we didn’t have a choice.”

   “That’s right.”

   “I know that.”

   “I doubt I’ll sleep for days,” I said, flipping on the high beams just as something skittered into the woods in front of us. “I’m not happy about any of this.”

   “Are you crying?” Holly asked.

   “A little.”

   She was crying too. I could tell from the tremble in her voice. “This will always be a part of us,” she said.

   “But we’ll get over it,” I replied.

 

* * *

 

   • • •

   No one is going to miss Cole. We’re counting on that. Sure, he used to have other friends, guys like Gus Drummond, but they don’t hang out anymore. He used to have us.

   He doesn’t even have a family. Ever since his brother, Craig, took off to work the oil fields somewhere in the nowhere of Canada, Cole had been living alone in their trailer. No dad, no mom, no one.

   Meeka says the last time Cole talked to his dad was in middle school, when the wispy-bearded guy passed through town on his way from Montreal to Florida. He was driving a pickup with who knows what stashed in the truck box, and he stopped by to tell his sons “not to fuck up your lives like certain people do.”

   It was a not-so-subtle dig on Cole’s mom, Teri. A sweet woman who worked the register at Carlton’s Bakery, Teri had struggled with addiction for years. Alcohol and painkillers at first, but by the time we were in high school and stuff like fentanyl was getting big around here, she dove in and never resurfaced. In the winter of our junior year, she passed away. Heart attack was what the obituary said, but we all knew it was the drugs that did her in. She had that bad skin, those mossy teeth, the dead eyes. It was inevitable.

   Meeka worked at Carlton’s on weekends and had known Teri. Teri had even revealed a secret to her. “I had another kid,” she whispered early one Sunday morning as they crouched down to fill the display case with chocolate croissants. “When I was a teenager. I gave her up for adoption.”

   “Wow,” Meeka replied. “That must’ve been . . . difficult.”

   Teri sat on the floor, stared at the wall, and said, “Tell me it was the right choice.”

   It was an awkward and unreasonable request, and Meeka was split between two decisions: push the woman away or hug her. She chose to hug, and as Teri wept in her arms, Meeka said, “It was the right choice. Kids like me have it way better than we would’ve otherwise.”

   When Teri died, Meeka told us she was surprised by how devastated she felt, so she wrapped her arms around Teri’s son. Their grieving bound them together.

   Meeka and Cole said they loved each other early and often, but when things got bad, Meeka knew it had never been true. They needed each other, maybe. They needed too much of each other, I think. But for different reasons, and that’s what really broke them up.

   After the breakup, Cole decided to not return to Plainview High for senior year. His grades were terrible, and college didn’t seem like an option. He had a bit of money, though. Not from a job, but somehow he was paying for all the computers and gadgets he had stuffed in his trailer. He could afford takeout for almost every meal. Lots of Subway and pizza, but even that adds up after a while.

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